Sara Majka - Cities I've Never Lived In - Stories

Someone had once taken a chair from my table at a café. I had stood to get another chair. The change — the unexpected loss of the chair — had upset me, but then I was upset at myself for having to wander the café for another chair, while the others sat in a happy group, playing chess. After, I had used the chair to rest my feet, as if to explain my behavior. Do you feel this way? I would ask the woman. And, if she seemed kind and gentle enough, I might have asked her if we had to continue on. How long do we do this? I would ask, thinking that, if there was a set time, it might feel possible.

The security guard’s name was James. He was young and overweight and dressed sloppily. His Polo shirt was stained by the Big Gulp he kept on the counter, which was surprising in the austere museum. I first met him when a man came in who resembled a known art thief, and I was taken back to the room and shown a tape of my interaction with him. I couldn’t remember the moment, but there it was, replayed for me. James told me that I didn’t move much. He pointed toward the screen that showed the empty chair, the counter, and said there was a time when he had turned the monitor on and off because he thought it was broken, but then I had thrown something away.

After that we hung out from time to time. We would sit at the diner and talk about movies we had both seen, and sometimes I would watch tapes in the security room with him. I found it comforting that my time there had been recorded, that there were no lost moments, that I could think of a moment and find it again. Yet, when I played the tape from the day the woman came in asking for me, I didn’t recognize any women in the footage. I kept playing the tape, searching. James pointed and expressed appreciation of the skirt that I had worn that day. You don’t understand, I told him.

One day, after work, I found frames behind the museum Dumpster. One still had a painting in it, so I took it and crossed the street with it. The diner waitress was outside smoking. What is that? she said, bending down, her hair falling across her face. She said it reminded her of a print she’d had as a child. It had been over the sofa. It was washed-out greens and pinks, the colors of Monet, but even hazier. She looked back into the diner to see if anyone needed her, but there were only a few tables, everyone with head bowed.

I hung the painting in my apartment and found that other people repeated what the waitress said, that it reminded them of something they’d had as children. Eventually, I learned it was a print of a children’s book cover, while I had begun to think we had all gone somewhere in a dream together. Her gaze had gone soft looking at the painting. She didn’t seem to want to look away, in the way that shy people can have while examining things at parties. Is that why shy people are so curious? A life spent looking at things until the things themselves become interesting, until you have to see the bookshelves at parties, the small paintings outside bathrooms, all these places feel forbidden, but in fact everyone is right around the corner, and when someone passes you smile and try to leave, or they try to leave. But what other choice do we have? Sometimes that is the only consolation, that there’s never been another choice.

Carrying the painting, I ended up at a bar in a neighborhood I didn’t know. The streets were soft and tree-lined and narrowed to horizons that you could never reach. It was the kind of day when bars had drink specials listed on chalkboards outside, and this one also had large windows made of colored glass. Inside, there was a man from Peru who spoke faintly and several times pointed at the windows, asking me if I saw something. I didn’t know what he was pointing at, whether it was something that had just passed the window, or something that was outside that was interesting to him, or whether he liked the windows, the colors of them and what they made of the world outside.

I remembered other cities I had visited. How difficult it would have been to live in those places, and how difficult it was to be a stranger in a city. When you travel it is the same — first you know one street, then you learn another, then you go someplace else, until the city unfolds in your mind. I didn’t take steps to learn how to find the bar again and didn’t remember the name. Perhaps I like the magical qualities of not being able to find a place again. The Elentine or something. The small elephant.

I was worried back then, not that something bad was about to happen, but that it already had only I hadn’t realized it yet. I rode the train on days when the museum was closed. I watched women — thin, spare, alone-looking women who were older than me, always carrying parcels, bags, overstuffed leather purses. The light did something to their faces, laid them bare. As if on trains they wore the faces they had when alone. One day I saw a woman who looked like the one from the restaurant. She was standing on the platform. But I couldn’t tell, and I worried I was losing this, too. Losing my ability to identify a person. She stayed on the platform when the train arrived, watching it depart, made smaller by the distance we traveled from her.

During my last week at the museum, we put in a tape labeled “Gallery Five.” I had never seen this gallery before. The tape showed a badly lit space. It was so dark that you couldn’t see the art, only shapes on the wall and people walking toward them. On my third time watching, I identified the man and woman from the restaurant. I had overlooked them at first, as they were younger in the footage. The man had been wearing a hat and the woman was slimmer and moved in a lighter way. The man was animated in a way he wasn’t when I’d met him, and I wouldn’t have been able to place him had I not taken out a recent tape to compare. What are you doing? James asked, before turning back to watch another monitor. He had little interest in what I was doing. The older version of the man, there he was, looking much like a man lost in a dream. That might have been why he had reminded me of my father, who would watch my brother and me playing on the floor, or by the woods, or near the sea with the same look, as if he had already left us.

The younger version of the man wasn’t like this. He moved quickly and reached back to help the woman move through the crowd. He turned from time to time to speak to someone, lean in, shake hands. And then an image made me pause the tape so abruptly that James looked over. I saw, in the way that we always know ourselves — even in a photograph from an age we have no memory of — myself as a child.

I was only visible for a few seconds as I walked toward the man, touched him to steady myself, then walked back, not haltingly, or in any way lost. This certainty was so perplexing that I doubted if the child was really me, in the way that we sometimes wonder, when in love, whether this might be a person we don’t love at all. It was only that I so rarely walked toward something without fearing it would disappear or prove not to be the thing I thought. On the tape, I walked like those people always passing me by. What had filled me with such certainty? When I, for all I could see of the footage, was so alone, little more than a speck, there for a moment, then lost for eternity, neither going somewhere nor coming from somewhere?

You could see all of us — the woman from the restaurant, the man who had reminded me of my father — all of us altered by what had happened, and yet there was no way to know what had taken place. All that was left was a man, surprisingly nervous and eager, sharing a smile with a woman who was not in any way memorable, missing the sadness — the way she had watched the train depart as if watching what she wanted most in life move away from her — that had made her so beautiful to me.